From the headline, I thought this was going to be my opportunity to get into some kind of completely bogus, fraudulent business opportunity where I could bill the government for all manner of fake stuff that I never have to deliver.
Too bad. Disappointed, I am.
The problem with a small business is that they are too expensive. They cannot get economies of scale; which means that the supported unit pays more, so the customer pays more, so the tax payer pays more. I don’t have a good solution and no else does either.
While I agree that the government, and especially DoD has never met their published small business goals, I don’t think that this article makes a very good case to support this. Using my company as an example, we are a small business with prime contracts and contracts with large businesses as a subcontractor. Our prime contract invoices are fed into a government database and are tracked by contracting offices against small business goals. But, our subcontracts for the most part are not tracked automatically. The contracting office must audit the prime contractor for compliance with their small business participation plan and manually report the information. My experience has been that this is often done incorrectly or not at all. What they end up doing is reporting the goals, not the actual performance. Some large companies take advantage of this to underexecute on their small business subcontracts and they are never held to account.
The reason that large businesses appear on these reports is because of this arrangement and that’s why the number that the government reports is never accurate.